Monday, March 26, 2007

Friday, March 16, 2007

The hardcopy command is implemented through a script hardcopy.tcl in Xspec/src/scripts. This script had an error and didn't work. Note that implementing a command through a script means that abbreviating the command doesn't work.

Glenn Morris reported bizarre behaviour in xspec11 when giving setplot an invalid argument. This turned out to be an uninitialized string in xanlib/xparse/xinfix.f which has somehow avoided detection before now. Note that we really need to fix the Makefile in xspec11/src/tcl so that libxantcl*.a is rebuilt if libxanlib*.a is changed.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Hiromitsu Takahashi reports that the compps model in xspec seg faults when using the Suzaku XIS response. This is because there were hard-wired array sizes in xscompps.f. I replaced these by dynamic arrays using the standard method as well as removing some unused variables. This change in is v11.3.2ae and will be in v12 shortly.

Gliozzi et al. describe Chandra observations of three Sy IIs whose variability and spectral properties are similar to Sy Is implying these may be AGN without a BLR.

Heavens et al. extend the Fisher Matrix to provide a way of estimating how good a planned experiment will be at distinguishing between different models.

Gilmore reviews the six types of stellar populations in the Galaxy and what can be learned from their study.

Liddle et al reply to a critique of Bayesian model selection by Linder & Miquel noting that the latter authors have made three serious errors in understanding the conceptual underpinnings of the method.

Boehringer et al. introduce a survey with XMM of a representative sample of clusters which is designed to investigate the uncertainties in determining cosmological parameters from X-ray cluster surveys.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Jamie Kennea reports problems with extractor on Intel Mac when filtering on a region. If an indirect file was in use for the input event files it was being opened multiple times and not closed. Eventually this generated an error in the fortran open statement. Also moved the ADDFN routine from extractor.f to wstdky.f because it was only being called from WSTDKY. These fixes are v4.76 and go out with HEAsoft 6.2.

Followed up with a whole bunch of mainly cosmetic changes to eliminate most of the compiler warning messages from g95. This is v4.77 and is not part of HEAsoft 6.2.

Another iteration for 4.78 which simplifies the code for reading the file containing the names of input event files and ensures that this file is not opened again when it is already open.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Russell et al. use MCMC to do a joint analysis of Chandra and ROSAT data on the cool core group NGC 4325.

Holder et al. estimate the SZ background and consider the limits on SZ cluster measurements due to confusion effects.

Zhang et al. look at the X-ray properties and scaling relations for 12 z~0.2 clusters observed by XMM-Newton and note that if the central cores are excluded then normalizations agree to 10% irrespective of cluster morphology.